TORCHWOOD: Epidemic
by Flawed Heroine
Summary: An illness is sweeping Cardiff that is probably alien, and definitely deadly. With TWO of their team infected and dying, can Torchwood still manage to save their own  and, not to mention, the world ?
1. Faint

**SYNOPSIS: An illness is sweeping Cardiff that is probably alien, and definitely deadly. With TWO of their team infected and dying, can Torchwood still manage to save their own (and, not to mention, the world)?**

**RATING: T. So_ SOME _swearing by - you guessed it - Owen, innuendo, snogging, and a bit of violence and blood near the end. Please tell me if this rating is too low. In my POV it isn't.**

**SPOILERS: Set after "To the Last man" and before "Meat", so there will spoilers if you haven't watched the episodes prior. **

**PAIRINGS: Well, you may just have to guess on that one but some of the more obvious pairings are Gwen/Rhys and Jack/Ianto.**

**DISCLAIMER: Of course I don't own Torchwood, any of its characters, paraphernalia, catchphrases and whatnot. **

**I'm Australian, so any Welsh, English or American stereotypes - blame television, not me and please forgive my limited knowledge. I only just learned what a Chav was.**

**If you've taken the time to read, please review. Even flames, I don't care, just let me know that someone is reading this, otherwise I won't see the point in continuing or updating, really. **

**

* * *

**

As the warm morning light swept over Cardiff, Gwen buried her nose into her pillow and silently begged for five minutes more sleep. Rhys was already up, which was surprising, as Gwen usually beat him out of the door, what with her early morning starts for Torchwood. And he was cooking breakfast, which was even more surprising. Bacons and eggs, by the smell of it. Gwen stretched out underneath her covers and reminded herself to thank her fiance who had been so understanding through her late night shifts and increasingly grumpy attitude. She smiled to herself and reluctantly hauled herself out of bed. She stumbled. The ground felt slightly unsteady under her feet.

"Urgh - what did I drink last night?" Gwen groaned, meeting Rhys in the kitchen. He was wearing a crisp white t-shirt, new jeans, and an apron. He smelled of cologne and his hair was even brushed. Gwen suddenly felt very underdressed in her worn oversized t-shirt she sometimes wore to bed.

"What do yer mean?" Rhys asked, pouring her a glass of orange juice. She took it, smiling at him appreciatively.

"I think I've got a hangover." Gwen mumbled, struggling to remember whether she had been drunk the night before.

"You seemed fine when you got home - at _three_ in the morning, I might add. Perhaps you've been drinking in your sleep. Or perhaps you're just exhausted. It's no wonder you slept till eleven."

Gwen felt some of the orange juice rise in her throat. "Eleven? _Shit_!" She ran back to the bedroom and glanced at the alarm clock. She stared at the blank screen angrily, and then at the loose plug. She stormed back into the kitchen. "Did you unplug it?" Rhys looked sheepish. "Why didn't you wake me? I'm late for work already because of you!"

Rhys thrust a ceramic plate down on the counter, angry. "Forgive me for trying to help you. You work insane hours, you're always tired, you look like hell!"

"Aw, _thanks_!" Gwen rushed into the bathroom, turning on the shower. As she did, she glanced at herself in the mirror. He was right. She was pale, her eyes had deep shadows underneath them, and she didn't look herself.

Rhys called from inside the kitchen. "I'm just saying, is all! One day you're going to run yourself into the ground, and don't think I be there to catch you when you fall!"

"I don't need catching!" Gwen retorted, stepping into the shower and feeling jets of icy cold water wash over her, waking her up.

* * *

Gwen walked in through the cog door, and waited expectantly as the team's eyes fell on her. Owen peered at her pasty skin and dark rings with a snort of disdain, Ianto seemed fixed on her unruly mop of hair, which she had had no time to blowdry or straighten and was sticking out at all kinds of angles. Toshiko was the only one to give her any sign of sympathy - she herself was looking quite worn out as she typed almost unconsciously into her super computer. Jack walked over to Gwen slowly, looking her sternly in the eyes.

"We've been waiting for you," he said accusingly.

"I'm sorry, Rhys turned off the alarm," Gwen said groggily, hating the way her excuse sounded, as if her personal life was indeed getting in the way of Torchwood. Jack rolled his eyes and turned to the rest of the team.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. Listen - some distress calls that need taking care of. Owen - you go to the hospital, there's some sort of outbreak or something, can't remember, just be your usual cheery comforting doctor self and take care of it. Toshiko, you go with him. Ianto, I'm sorry, but there is a stack of paperwork on my desk that needs to be done."

Ianto nodded dutifully. "Consider it done, sir."

"Jack." Jack corrected, an air of exasperation in his voice.

"Sorry, _Jack_." Ianto headed off towards Jack's office to collect the papers. Jack grinned after him.

" That's better! And Gwen, since you're late, you get to come with me. We've got Weevil duty and you know how they are when they're fresh out of the sewers."

Gwen slapped her hand to her head. "Eurgh." And if her day wasn't bad enough, Owen was walking over to her with a rather happy gait - his face was alight with smugness. He leaned in to Gwen's ear.

"Are you hungover, Gwen?" He whispered.

Gwen nodded. "Little bit, yeah. Except I can't even remember drinking."

Owen clapped his hands loudly. "Well, party on Cooper!"

"I feel dead." Gwen said flatly.

Owen grinned. "Oh, that's just your body letting you know that you've _killed_ it. Doctor's advice? REHAB!"

Gwen swatted him lightly in the arm, because that was all she could muster. "I'm not a bloody alcoholic, Owen."

Owen raised one eyebrow. "You wake up hungover, and you can't remember the night before. I'm sorry, but that's screaming alcoholism to me. And _I_ should know. I'm a doctor." He winked at her, causing Gwen to channel all of her energy into an angry shove.

"Oh, get off!"

"Gwen! Come on!" Jack was waiting impatiently by the Invisible Lift and tapping his wrist-strap as if it was a watch.

Gwen sighed and started to amble towards the Invisible Lift; Toshiko and Owen disappeared through the cog door.

"You look _awful_," Jack remarked, in awe of just how terrible Gwen looked. She stared up at him fiercely, stepping onto the lift.

"Gee, _thanks_. I didn't know you were joining the **I HATE GWEN **club, too. Did you know Rhys is a lifetime member?"

"Sorry," Jack was quick to make a recovery, pressing the button on his wriststrap. The lift began to rise. "I just meant to say that you look like you need a rest."

"Yeah, well, it's a bit hard with this job, isn't it?" Gwen muttered bitterly.

"Oh, shoot!" Jack pressed the button on his wriststrap again, the lift stopping dead. "Just wait here, I have to get something."

Gwen threw up her arms. "What do you mean wait here? Where are you going?"

Before Gwen could shout any more, Jack jumped from the platform, his coat billowing out behind him as he dropped several metres and landed nimbly on his feet.

"Back in a sec!" Jack said boyishly as he ran off in the direction of his office.

"Jack!" Gwen yelled. "Jack, what are you doing, you can't just leave me up here!" Gwen stared at the ground where Jack had landed, she felt unsteady on her feet. Perhaps she was succumbing to a sudden onset of vertigo, or perhaps she was still drunk from last night, but suddenly the Hub was spinning around her...

Jack grabbed a bottle of Weevil spray from his desk drawer. "Hah! Got it!"

"Be careful." Ianto warned from the other side of the room.

Jack sniggered. "After everything I've come back from, you still worry about me."

"Can you heal scars? I'd hate for you to come back horribly disfigured."

"Hmmm, unfortunately I'm going to look like this for quite some time yet." He stepped closer to Ianto, feigning upset.

"The shame. How will I ever cope?" Ianto said, looking into Jack's eyes.

"I'm sure we'll find a way." Jack exited the office, with Ianto following closely. Between the two of them, they were the only ones who hadn't succumbled to the unspoken rule of Torchwood - that leather should be worn at all times, or at least, once a week. Ianto didn't because on his first day working at Torchwood, Jack had casually remarked that Ianto "looked good in a suit", and since then, was rarely seen out of one. Jack's excuse was that his leather days were behind him.

"This should only be quick," said Jack. "There aren't really any sewer-fresh Weevils on the loose, I just said that to Gwen to make her feel bad because she was late. We're just getting some fragments of meteor rock that fell through the Rift."

"Quite a normal day then." Ianto observed. "And how abnormal for us."

"Yeah." Jack's reply was hesitant. In sense, all of Torchwood's days had _started out _normal.

They walked back to the lift, talking.

"Are the reports from the hospital a major concern then?" Ianto inquired.

Jack shrugged. "Doesn't look like it - I got another call, seems it's an outbreak of meningochoccal."

"Then why did you sent Owen and Tosh out?"

"Gotta give them something to do, right Gwen?" He called to Gwen, who was still standing on the lift, but she didn't answer. Something was wrong - from the ground Jack could see her staggering and swaying about. "Gwen? Are you alright?" But before he could get an answer, Gwen's legs buckled out from under her. "_GWEN_!" Gwen fell, tumbling off the platform and into the air. Jack, more terrified than Ianto had ever seen him, outstretched his arms to catch her. She fell heavily into his arms, he struggled to maintain a hold of her with the impact, bending his knees and sinking into the ground. Ianto exchanged a shocked glance with Jack. Had they been there seconds later, Gwen could have been seriously injured, or worse. Jack sat down, his hand supporting Gwen's head, his eyes scanning her blank face in terror. He finally tore his eyes away from her, just for a second, staring upwards at Ianto.

"_Get Owen_."

* * *

**Next chapter:**

**Gwen is diagnosed - but is it at all what she expected?**

**Further twattiness from King of the Twats, Dr Owen Harper.**

**Even more Torchwood drama as another of the team is in danger.**


	2. And They All Come Falling Down

**SYNOPSIS: An illness is sweeping Cardiff that is probably alien, and definitely deadly. With TWO of their team infected and dying, can Torchwood still manage to save their own (and, not to mention, the world)?**

**RATING: T. So_ SOME _swearing by - you guessed it - Owen, innuendo, snogging, and a bit of violence and blood near the end. Please tell me if this rating is too low. In my POV it isn't.**

**SPOILERS: Set after "To the Last man" and before "Meat", so there will spoilers if you haven't watched the episodes prior. **

**PAIRINGS: Well, you may just have to guess on that one but some of the more obvious pairings are Gwen/Rhys and Jack/Ianto.**

**DISCLAIMER: Of course I don't own Torchwood, any of its characters, paraphernalia, catchphrases and whatnot. **

**I'm Australian, so any Welsh, English or American stereotypes - blame television, not me and please forgive my limited knowledge. I only just learned what a Chav was.**

**If you've taken the time to read, please review. Even flames, I don't care, just let me know that someone is reading this, otherwise I won't see the point in continuing or updating, really. **

_**PREVIOUSLY: Gwen was feeling woozy and majorly pissed off, she thought it was just a bad hangover (prompting some snarky comments from Owen about alcoholism) but she was wrong. She fainted in the most dramatic of ways (falling off the Invisible Lift, I know) and was only just caught by Jack as he yelled for Ianto to get Torchwood's resident medic, Owen Harper.**_

* * *

As Gwen's eyes opened, she took in her surroundings. There were computer screens everywhere. The walls were white and there was medical equipment in the corner. A slightly blurred Captain Jack Harkness was staring at her from above. He looked concerned.

"Alright, she's coming around now." Gwen heard Owen's voice. "Keep back, give her some air, will you?"

Then Gwen realised. She was in the autopsy bay. She quickly tried to get up, but the world was not yet in focus.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa." Jack pushed her gently back onto the table. "Just take it easy, there's no need to rush."

Gwen looked around dazedly. "What happened? Why am I in the autopsy room? Please tell me not I'm dead."

Jack laughed nervously, shaking his head. "No, you're not dead. You just fainted."

"What?" She tried to prop herself up again and this time, Jack didn't stop her. As she sat up, more faces came into view - Ianto, Toshiko, and Owen. Owen's eyes were wide as he looked at her. "What is it, Owen? Is it bad? Am I ill?"

Owen grinned halfheartedly. "Just not used to seeing you conscious is all - what after Suzie, and the poisoned lipgloss, and now this... I think you're becoming my most frequent customer."

Gwen's face sunk as she realised that this was true. "Well, I guess someone has to make sure you're doing your job, Mr Medic."

Toshiko leant on the table wearily, staring hard at the computers. "Owen, what's the diagnosis?"

"Huh." He clasped his hands together and stared stonily at Gwen, entering doctor mode. "Gwen, have you recently become vegetarian or vegan?"

Gwen looked at him very seriously. "I'm Welsh."

"Didn't think so. Well, here's another question and I want you to consider your answer very carefully."

Gwen straigtened up. "Will do."

Owen stared Gwen in the eyes. "Gwen... are you pregnant?"

Gwen gasped. "No!"

Owen was narrowing his eyes and giving her the classic "Gwen, you idiot, you complete fuckwit" look she had grown accustomed to since her first day as a part of Torchwood - she had accidentally let a sex-crazed gas alien loose on Cardiff all as part of her efforts to look tougher in front of Owen. "ARE YOU SURE?"

Gwen flew into a state of panic. "Oh, shit... I'm not, am I? Am I? I'm not... SHIT! I can't have a baby now, Rhys and I aren't even married yet, my mam would kill me! And then there's Torchwood - aw, there's no way I'm doing Torchwood pregnant!" Her eyes widened to large green spheres as she implored Owen for the answer. To her surprise, he just grinned. Was that a happy grin? A conglaturatory grin? She felt her breathing get shallow; she pressed her palms against the table for support.

"Alright, that's enough, Owen. She's already ill, give her a break," Jack reprimanded. Owen pouted.

"Alright, alright. Party pooper," Owen put his hands on Gwen's shoulders reassuringly, but she was still hyperventilating. "_Calm down_, Gwen! I'm just messing with you. If you were, that would be the first thing my machines would pick up, I wouldn't need to ask _you_."

Gwen sighed in utter relief, but her breathing was still laboured. If she had the strength, she would have punched Owen out, she thought furiously. "Bloody hell, thank goodness for that. Owen, you're a bastard, you know that?"

Owen smirked. "I try." Then his face hardened. "But seriously, you have a shockingly low iron count, Gwen. I think you might be anaemic."

"Anaemic? What is that caused from?"

"Low iron count, a-duh."

Gwen rolled her eyes. "Yes, but what lifestyle factors can trigger it? Because I eat a balanced diet, I shouldn't be low on iron."

Owen shrugged. "Yeah, but some people are just naturally low. When was the last time you had a blood test?"

Gwen thought for a second. "It was when I joined Torchwood, just to make sure I wasn't an alien or hopped up on anything. You ought to remember, you poked me four times with the syringe before you drew any blood. May I just add, your bedside manner sucks."

"Well, whatever. Go to the pharmacist, buy some iron supplements, and you'll be right as rain, as long as you take them. Fuck knows this place doesn't need any more fainting spells."

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than Toshiko fell to the ground.

"Tosh!" Gwen cried.

Owen thrust his hands to his hips, looking at Toshiko's unconscious form irritably. Jack stooped down to Toshiko concernedly. "Ah, bloody hell, what next?"

After just a few seconds, Toshiko regained consciousness. She looked around the autopsy room groggily and her eyes fell on Jack, who was attempting to help her up.

"Tosh, are you okay?" Jack asked, resting his hands on her shoulders. She suddenly grasped a tight hold of Jack's arms, squeezing her eyes shut, trying to remember what had happened.

"I don't know-"

"It's okay, just take it easy, Tosh. Breathe," Jack said soothingly. It was odd to see Toshiko so shaken, so weak, but admittedly, after Tommy's departure, she had not been herself, more prone to shock, even straying in her duties to daydream. She also hung around Owen more often.

"Oh- I was standing, and then I just felt really dizzy and everything blacked out, just for a second..." She started to relax, Jack seized her lower arms and supported her as she started to slump over. Gwen sat in shock, looking on at the situation from the autopsy table.

"They're dropping like flies," Ianto mused. "And they all came tumbling down..."

Jack looked up at Ianto from the floor. "Hey, hey, hey. Let's not get all prophetical, here. It could be just a coincidence, right, Owen?"

Owen shrugged, pulling a pair of white latex gloves on and grabbing a syringe. "I honestly don't know, Jack. And truth be told, with all that we see, I'm doubting it's just a coincidence. Something is affecting the women of Torchwood, and I'm going to find out what that is."

* * *

**Next chapter: **

**Owen gets all doctor-like and tries to diagnose the sorry pair.**

**Jack jumps to some violence-provoking conclusions.**

**Even further twattiness from Dr Owen Harper.**

**More revelations about the mystery ailment.**


	3. Black and Blue

**SYNOPSIS: An illness is sweeping Cardiff that is probably alien, and definitely deadly. With TWO of their team infected and dying, can Torchwood still manage to save their own (and, not to mention, the world)?**

**RATING: T. So_ SOME _swearing by - you guessed it - Owen, innuendo, snogging, and a bit of violence and blood near the end. Please tell me if this rating is too low. In my POV it isn't.**

**SPOILERS: Set after "To the Last man" and before "Meat", so there will spoilers if you haven't watched the episodes prior. **

**PAIRINGS: Well, you may just have to guess on that one but some of the more obvious pairings are Gwen/Rhys and Jack/Ianto.**

**DISCLAIMER: Of course I don't own Torchwood, any of its characters, paraphernalia, catchphrases and whatnot. **

**I'm Australian, so any Welsh, English or American stereotypes - blame television, not me and please forgive my limited knowledge. I only just learned what a Chav was.**

**If you've taken the time to read, please review. Even flames, I don't care, just let me know that someone is reading this, otherwise I won't see the point in continuing or updating, really. **

**PREVIOUSLY Gwen was feeling under the weather and fainted. Owen's scans showed Gwen to be anaemic, but just as he was about to declare it a closed case, Toshiko collapsed, leading the team to believe that there might be something else going on.**

**

* * *

**

In five minutes, Owen had taken Toshiko's blood, run an environment diagnostic and correlated the information on both Toshiko and Gwen's blood, contrasting and comparing the findings. Toshiko and Gwen were sharing the autopsy table now, both slumbed over, and both looking incredibly weak. Still, they were attempting to be of some use - Toshiko was scanning herself with a piece of alien equipment that looked like a futuristic kind of wand, and Gwen was flicking through one of the folders in the medical archives concerning blood-related diseases and infections. Jack impatiently grabbed both out of their hands.

Owen flicked his clipboard with his fingers, passing it around to Jack and Ianto. "It's the same, the same symptoms. Low in iron, the red-blood cell count down -obviously, pretty low on most other nutrients too. I'd go as far as to say that they've got the same thing."

"Could it be contagious then?" Ianto covered his mouth instinctively.

"Impossible, I ran samples on the air, and there's nothing, no contagions, nothing."

"Perhaps it's only contagious to women?" Jack suggested.

"Well, maybe. But that could mean that the entire female population of Cardiff could be infected. Jack, when you sent me and Tosh out to the hospital did they mention anything of this sort?"

Jack clicked his fingers, suddenly remembering the assignment that he had sent Owen and Toshiko on as a ploy to get them out of the Hub, for some much-needed one on one time. Then maybe Owen would finally pick up on the oh-so-obvious hints that Tosh had been dropping and Gwen, Jack and Ianto might finally be put out of their misery. But now the hospital was more than just a clever ruse, it could hold the answers. "Uh, I don't think so, they just kept going on about meningococchal, but they said they had it sorted. Still, they could have taken in an influx of patients just like Gwen and Tosh, and just haven't made the connection. Ianto, get the hospital on the phone."

"Yes, sir." Ianto nodded, quickly exiting the autopsy bay.

"Don't call me - oh, never mind..." Jack was too preoccupied to care what Ianto called him right now. "So, Owen, you mentioned a low red-blood cell count?"

Owen nodded, referring back to his clipboard. "Yes, well I put that down to low iron-levels. See, when your iron levels drop, the body can't produce as much haemoglobin. Haemoglobin is the magic ingredient of the red blood cell - without it, the body becomes anaemic. There's less blood going around the body, less oxygen being carried to the lungs and heart - which is the reason the girls are feeling so knackered right now. Also, the low cell count accounts for the lack of other nutrients in the body, et cetera, et cetera."

"But it all seemed to happen quite suddenly, and at the same time, so we can't put this all down to anaemia."

"Yep, that's right. It's not something I've seen before."

Jack turned to the girls, trying to place a connection in his head. Toshiko was definitely more lethargic than Gwen, and was holding her arms close to her body, her head hanging low. Gwen had still managed to maintain her usual vigour, but her skin had been almost completely drained of its colour, and the circles under her eyes were deep and dark. In fact, one of the circles had somehow spread to her upper eyelid. Jack swept in, lifting up Gwen's chin and examining both of her eyes. One was definitely different from the other.

"Gwen, what happened to your eye?" Jack said, the pitch in his voice wavering involuntarily.

Gwen's hand flew to her face. "What, what is it?"

Owen gulped down hard, his eyes settling on Gwen. He quickly picked up a mirror from his tray of tools and held it up in front of her. "Look."

"Wha- How did that happen? It looks like a bruise." She was right. Around her right eye, a dark purple mark had come about in just a few minutes. She pressed it gingerly. "Ouch."

Jack stooped to her level, his face deadly serious. He took Gwen's hands in his and looked her in the eyes. "Did Rhys do this to you?"

Gwen, shocked, pulled her hands swiftly out of Jack's and stood up. "WHAT? Jack, no! How could you even think that, even for a second?"Jack instantly recoiled, he was facing Gwen in her ultimate height of emotion, something he had not seen from her since Rhys had died and she knocked him to the ground with a single punch. He quickly stepped backwards, cowering to shield himself from any incoming swipes or hits.

"You said he was angry with you," he said quietly. Then Gwen shoved him in the shoulder. Hard.

"Yeah, but COME ON! You don't really think - oh, Jack. Do you really think he would? Do you really think that I would stand for something like that? I'd bloody KILL him if he tried something like that on me."

"No, no, you're right. I'm sorry, but you know. I had to ask. And, ah, no more taking the firearms home with you." Jack smiled weakly, as Gwen gave him a warning look, and he took another step backwards to avoid further violence.

"Come on, sit down Gwen. You're not well." Owen gently pushed a dizzy Gwen back onto the table. He then turned to Jack, who was still wincing and rolling his shoulder. "Did she really hurt you?" He asked mockingly.

"Hey!" Jack said defensively. "She might think her punches are cute, but they really hurt! I remember when she shoved me when I got back from..." He hesitated, not wanting to mention his travels with the Doctor. Because that would lead to questions, mostly from Gwen. And those questions would lead to a lot of raw hurt, the reopening of wounds that had yet to finally seal themselves. He quickly decided to leave it. "Anyway, she definitely doesn't punch like a girl."

Gwen smiled faintly, then turning to Owen. "But I still don't understand... I don't remember being hit. Do you think I hit my eye when I fell?"

Owen thought for a second, examining her eye. "Maybe, yeah that might explain it. Except that the inside of your eye, the sclera, would be red from the impact and yours isn't. And it would be swelling, too." He gently touched her eye; Gwen winced. "Does it hurt?"

"A bit," Gwen understated. "It's kind of throbbing, actually."

"A pulse of blood, rushing to repair what's been broken. That's a bruise for you," Owen said, grabbing a light from his tray and shining it into both of Gwen's eyes. "Nope, no signs of concussion - if you hit your head on the way down, I just can't see it..." He paused for second, still examining Gwen's head. "Gwen, darling, are you wearing makeup?"

"Yes, as always," Gwen said flatly. "Why?"

A malicious smirk appeared on Owen's face. "Just seems curious is all, seeing as you didn't even bother to run a comb through your hair this morning."

Gwen self-consciously put a hand to her matted head of hair. "It goes funny when it's wet! Besides, it takes forever to blow-dry and straighten it, it takes all of two seconds to put makeup on in the car."

"You put on makeup when you're driving?"

"Only when the traffic is slow!"

"You used to be a cop, whatever happened to road safety?"

"Well, you used to be a doctor! Whatever happened to bedside manners!"

Jack stood laughing, watching the two of them bicker for a while, when he noticed Toshiko's strange form. She was hunched over, cradling her arms, her hair shielding her face. Jack quickly stooped to her level, pushing the strands of brown hair away from her face. Toshiko looked up at him, her eyes wide and her mouth a thin straight line. This was when Jack started to get nervous. Toshiko was tougher than Gwen, in some aspects. When the going got tough, she hardly ever screamed, she hardly ever cried, and she hardly ever showed how scared she was. But at this very moment she looked terrified.

"Tosh, what is it?" Gwen asked, suddenly realizing.

"Gwen, roll up your sleeves," Toshiko said shakily.

"What? Why?"

"Just do it." At that moment, Owen knelt before Toshiko and tenderly unfolded her arms, holding them out. Gwen gasped. Toshiko's arms were mottled with bruises, almost identical to the one around Gwen's eye, bluish in colour and flat against the skin. Her eyes widening even further, Gwen slowly and carefully took off her jacket and revealed her own arms, stained in black and blue against the ghostly white of her skin.

* * *

**NEXT CHAPTER:**

**In the mother of all shocks, Gwen acts in a stubborn manner towards the team (namely Jack).**

**Ianto needs to stay away from the weapons cabinet.**

**The hospital needs help from Torchwood.**


	4. Groupies

**SYNOPSIS: An illness is sweeping Cardiff that is probably alien, and definitely deadly. With TWO of their team infected and dying, can Torchwood still manage to save their own (and, not to mention, the world)?**

**RATING: T. So_ SOME _swearing by - you guessed it - Owen, innuendo, snogging, and a bit of violence and blood near the end. Please tell me if this rating is too low. In my POV it isn't.**

**SPOILERS: Set after "To the Last man" and before "Meat", so there will spoilers if you haven't watched the episodes prior. **

**PAIRINGS: Well, you may just have to guess on that one but some of the more obvious pairings are Gwen/Rhys and Jack/Ianto.**

**DISCLAIMER: Of course I don't own Torchwood, any of its characters, paraphernalia, catchphrases and whatnot. **

**I'm Australian, so any Welsh, English or American stereotypes - blame television, not me and please forgive my limited knowledge. I only just learned what a Chav was.**

**If you've taken the time to read, please review. Even flames, I don't care, just let me know that someone is reading this, otherwise I won't see the point in continuing or updating, really. **

_**PREVIOUSLY: While Gwen and Owen continued to bicker, Toshiko noticed something about the condition that nobody had yet to pick up - Toshiko and Gwen's arms are covered in painful bruises that they don't remember attaining...**_

_**

* * *

**_

"It's the hospital, sir," Ianto announced, standing at the railings of the autopsy bay, holding up his cell phone. "They say they've got about a hundred patients in, with more on the way, all with symptoms of weakness and bruising, thought to be meningococcal at first, until that theory was proven wrong. They think it might be alien, they're clueless and they want our help."

Jack tore his eyes away from Gwen and Toshiko for just a second. "What did you tell them?"

Ianto shrugged. "I told them I'd ask you, but Gwen and Tosh aren't exhibiting the symptoms."

Jack and Owen stepped away from the table, revealing Gwen and Toshiko's bruised figures. Gwen smiled weakly at him with her black eye.

"Oh." Ianto stared, blankfaced, handing the phone to Jack.

"Yeah, exactly," said Jack, holding the phone to his ear. "Yeah, this is Torchwood. What have you got? Uh huh. Uh huh. Right, we're on our way." He threw the phone back over his shoulder at Ianto, who just caught it with both hands. "All right, then. This is what we're going to do. Owen, you're coming with me. We're going to the hospital to find out just what's going on. Ianto, you stay back and look after the girls."

"Excuse me?" Gwen piped up from the table. "We don't need babysitting, we're coming with you."

Jack raised his eyebrows. "You can barely stand up, I want team members, not liabilities."

"Jack, as much as I want to agree with you, if something happens to them, if their condition deteriorates, I'll need to be there," Owen interrupted.

"Then you don't have to come," Jack said flippantly.

"And who's going to do the medical analysis? YOU?" Owen sneered. "I'm sorry, but the girls go where I go."

Jack shot him an authorative look. "The girls do what _I_ tell them."

"Could you please stop referring to us as the girls? We're starting to sound like your groupies," said Gwen in exasperation.

"Aren't we all, though? Jack Harkness' groupies, I mean," Ianto mused.

"No, we're not," Gwen said indignantly.

"We are, a little bit," Toshiko said quietly. Gwen turned on her with a sense of someone betrayed, and Toshiko recoiled.

"Don't I get a say in this, sir?" Ianto asked. "Because I had Tosh run a software exchange from the computers to my phone, if anyone calls in regards to the virus, or a random spike of rift energy pops up, if Weevils start roaming the streets - the second I exit the Hub, I'm alerted... and also, I'm really, really, really sick of this place. Honestly, I'm about two seconds away from Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Sir."

Jack stared at his stubborn crew for a couple of seconds, and exhaled loudly (and deliberately). "Alright! Alright, then. You can all come - but Gwen and Tosh- no heavy lifting, and Ianto... better keep away from the weapons cabinet, huh?"

Ianto followed Jack, Owen and a very wobbly Gwen and Toshiko towards the cog door, a wry grin plastered on his face. "All work and no play makes Ianto a dull boy."

"There'll be time for play, later!" Jack yelled, disappearing through the cog door. "Now, COME ON!"

* * *

**Next chapter:**

**Stairs are the enemy.**

**Gwen the emo?**

**Owen gets pissed off - at himself, for a change!**

**If you've taken the time to read, please review. Even flames, I don't care, just let me know that someone is reading this, otherwise I won't see the point in continuing or updating, really. **


	5. Stairs Are the ENEMY

**SYNOPSIS: An illness is sweeping Cardiff that is probably alien, and definitely deadly. With TWO of their team infected and dying, can Torchwood still manage to save their own (and, not to mention, the world)?**

**RATING: T. So_ SOME _swearing by - you guessed it - Owen, innuendo, snogging, and a bit of violence and blood near the end. Please tell me if this rating is too low. In my POV it isn't.**

**SPOILERS: Set after "To the Last man" and before "Meat", so there will spoilers if you haven't watched the episodes prior. **

**PAIRINGS: Well, you may just have to guess on that one but some of the more obvious pairings are Gwen/Rhys and Jack/Ianto.**

**DISCLAIMER: Of course I don't own Torchwood, any of its characters, paraphernalia, catchphrases and whatnot. **

**I'm Australian, so any Welsh, English or American stereotypes - blame television, not me and please forgive my limited knowledge. I only just learned what a Chav was.**

**My last update for a while (I have exams!) but since I've already had this written up for ages, I thought I might as well put it up, there's no harm in it! And I know people are reading this (I think, I hope) so please do review, otherwise I feel like all my hard work procrastinating has gone to nothing! Well... actually, that's not entirely true. I love me some Torchwood, writing about it makes me happy nevertheless.**

_**PREVIOUSLY: The team were alerted that the hospital had admitted patients with the same symptoms. After some deliberance, it was decided the entire team would go to check it out, liabilities and all.**_

_**

* * *

**_

Inside the hospital, Gwen and Toshiko quickly learnt to roll down their sleeves - the bruise-like markings prompted nurses trying to rush them off to what was known as the "isolation ward" - the women shakily insisted that they were fine, that they were with Torchwood, and the entire team was suddenly ushered up three flights of stairs (Toshiko and Gwen protested to this and questioned the availability of the pedestrian lift after about three steps, to which Jack happily pointed out that they were eager to come in the first place and that stairs were just one part of the deal.)

"Gwen?" The captain looked back, and saw the ex-policewoman flailing about, trying to drag herself upwards by her hands using the staircase railings. Owen already had a slightly smiling Toshiko under his arm and was proceeding to help her up every step, so he was in no position to help Gwen. Jack rolled his eyes. "Liabilities," he muttered, and walked down the stairs to Gwen. "Do you need some help?"

"No, no, I'm fine," Gwen gasped, still trying to pull herself up with her ever-decreasing upper-body strength. Jack sighed heavily and deliberately, and picked her up, putting her over his shoulder and carrying her up the stairwell with her arms dangling towards the ground.

"Jack! Put me down!" Gwen protested briefly, but soon got used to being in Jack's arms, even if she was strung over his shoulder like a piece of meat.

"Jack, you'd better see this," Ianto called from the top the staircase, already looking through the doors of the isolation ward as the only member of Torchwood who wasn't supporting another person. Jack reached the top of the stairs and put Gwen down on her feet; she promptly staggered back into the wall and leant over with her hands on her knees.

"What is it, Jack?" She asked, panting.

"It's just what what we anticipated," Jack said, taking her hand and showing her the door. Inside the ward were dozens of patients, all so pale they blended in with the colour of their sheets, all spotted with bruises.

"It's the same thing. This is no coincidence," Owen said, letting Toshiko go at the top of the stairs and joining the group. "It's some kind of disease, and it's contagious. And not only to women, either, so that theory goes out the door."

He was right. The ward was filled with male and female patients. Some were old, some were young. Some were even related, it seemed.

"They all arrived between five o'clock this morning and now, each showing the same white skin, the same fatigue, the same bruises on their bodies. At first we put it down to haemophilia, but then the women started to show up," the nurse informed them.

"Well, I can undertstand why you're so confused. Haemophilia is passed on through female carriers, but only males can be infected. At birth. That's why I ruled out haemophilia for Toshiko and Gwen straight away," Owen said, picking up a couple of patients' charts from their beds and scanning them quickly. "Any similarity between those infected?"

The nurse nodded. "Yes. Well, whole families started to come in, all infected with the same virus, if you can call it that. That's when we started to look at blood types. All those affected were O-negative."

Owen suddenly let out a low groan, hitting himself in the forehead with his clipboard. "Blood types. I completely forgot about blood types. I didn't even think to look, well that's twelve years of medical training down the toilet," he muttered bitterly. "Gwen, Tosh, any idea what blood types you are?"

Gwen looked up from the doorframe she was leaning on. She was strategically trying to place a lock of her fringe over her black eye, and had managed to look quite emo with her pale skin, and uniform black clothing. Plus, she was none-too-cheerful, having the energy drained out of her by an unknown force, having Jack attend to her and Tosh as if they were babies, having shared an argument with a large portion of Cardiff's men and it wasn't even two in the afternoon. Rhys was going to be pissed when he came home, although he might be more fussed about the origins of her bruises."O-negative, I think. But you ought to know that, you're my doctor."

"I'm O-negative, too," said Toshiko. "Do you think it might have something to do with our blood-types, Owen?"

Owen shook his head, openly annoyed at himself for missing the most obvious of connections. "Oh, Tosh, sweetheart. It's got everything to do with your blood-types."

"But how does that work?" Ianto inquired. "You're talking, like, genetics."

"I don't know! It just has!" Owen bursted out, now absolutely outraged at himself that he had let such an obvious observation slip by him.

"Ok, ok." Jack said calmly. An emotional Owen was the last thing he wanted to deal with right now, seeing as the last time Owen had been this fired up, Jack had ended up being shot twice in the head. "Let's just collate the information. This is something we've never seen before, something that could have come through the Rift, perhaps. There's no need to get emotional, nobody's died yet." He turned to the nurse warily. "Right?"

"Right. We've got blood transfusions running on every on of them, but honestly, it's all for nothing. It's like something's bleeding them dry from the inside, and the blood banks won't last forever, you know. O-neg is not the most common blood type, and we get less and less donors every year..."

For Gwen, the words of the nurse were fading in and out, she was attempting to be interested in what she had to say about the mystery illness, but now something else was grabbing her attention. A tall man with pale skin, dark eyes and dark hair was standing in the doorway next to her, with a portable screen device in his hand. He looked anxious as stared on at the ward, oblivious of Gwen.

"Oh." He gasped, his black eyebrows furrowing together. "It's happening again."

At that, his eyes wandered to Gwen's; she stared at him with a look of deep confusion on her face. She also noted him to be quite handsome.

"What's that you've got in your hand?" She asked, pointing at the small piece of hardware. It wasn't alien, but it looked high-tech, like something Torchwood would have stashed away in its infinite archives and lockers.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, and then disappeared through the doors. Gwen started, turning to alarm Jack, Owen and Ianto but they were on the other side of the room, deep in conversation with the nurse.

"Come back!" She yelled, pushing past the doors. She heard Toshiko call her name a couple of times as she chased the young man down the stairwell, but most was just noise and light, she couldn't make most of it out. Everything was spinning around her, but she pushed forward, trying to catch the man who looked as if he might have some of the answers. But as she got to the bottom of the second staircase, she was vaguely aware that she was falling...

* * *

**NEXT CHAPTER:**

**What happens when you cross an emotional and frustrated Owen with the carelessness of Gwen and an alien illness mystery that is only just beginning to unfold? **


	6. Tosh and Translators

**SYNOPSIS: An illness is sweeping Cardiff that is probably alien, and definitely deadly. With TWO of their team infected and dying, can Torchwood still manage to save their own (and, not to mention, the world)?**

**Thank you so much to the people who've reviewed! :) Keep at it, if you can! (I know it's a long one but it's got some interesting bits to come - I think)**

_**PREVIOUSLY: Owen totally blanked on a basic medical procedure - and he is bovvered. Somehow the mystery illness has something to do with the blood type O-negative, which, unluckily, Gwen and Tosh seem to have, and they're decreasing in strength by the minute. This doesn't stop Gwen, however, from running down the stairs trying to catch an apologetic man with interesting tech...**_

* * *

"Gwen, you bleeding idiot." Owen cursed under his breath as he went to catch Gwen, who was stumbling about uncontrollably near the bottom of the second staircase. He grabbed her around the middle, but couldn't hold her up, due to his small frame, so he simply directed her towards the wall, and she slid down it, finding the floor with her hands.

"Get him, he's... he's got something in his hand, something alien," she gasped, pointing after the young man who was now on the final set of stairs. Jack and Ianto sprinted after him, guns raised. Toshiko was still carefully trying to make it down the stairs, wary of not making the same mistake Gwen did, not to get Owen angry at her. Although, Toshiko sensed he was actually just angry at himself.

"What in hell's name were you thinking, Gwen?" Owen growled, taking her pulse. Her head was lolling back and forth, her eyes large and glassy, but she tried to keep a straight face, in order to not cause a fuss - Owen was already pissed, and no doubt she would cop an earful from Jack the moment he came back. "Don't you understand what's going on? Your blood has lost the capacity to clot, one fall, one blow, one wound and it could be all over for you. Also, your red blood cell count is diminishing at a deadly rate, cutting off the oxygen supply to your brain, and what do you do? You decide it's time for a bloody relay! Shit, you are!"

"Geez, I'm sorry, alright?" Gwen said, pulling her arm away from his. "I just saw him and instinct took over. There was nobody else there, you wouldn't have got to him in time."

"And you would have? You really are daft, sometimes. You walk in front of bullets, in front of cars, making friends with murderous corpses, sleeper agents, 51st century killers-"

"Come on, Owen," Toshiko interrupted. "We've all made mistakes." She stared at him reprimandingly, as if to remind him that they too had stuff to hold against him. Like opening the Rift, which eventually led to one of the biggest disasters Torchwood had ever faced. Rhys had died on that day, and although Gwen didn't like to talk about it, and although Rhys did come back to life, the pain and memory of his death was still very real. It was like waking up from a nightmare, Gwen had disclosed to Toshiko in the days after Jack had left, her emotions still running high. It was like waking up from a nightmare, she said, that even while you know it was just a dream, that it never happened, your stomach was still in your throat and the world still felt like it was falling in pieces around you. Gwen had told her that sometimes she woke up in the middle of the night, reaching out blindly for Rhys, fearing that he wouldn't be there, and that sometimes she would cry just thinking about the whole thing with Abaddon, that she even considered taking Retcon, just to make the sheer pain of it go away.

It took Toshiko till she got home that night to realise that Gwen was reaching out, that she was trying to talk to her, that she needed help. Then felt as useless as she did when Rhys was lying cold on the autopsy table and Jack was cleaning the blood away from Gwen's hands, while she cried calmly and dreamed of a simpler life where Torchwood hadn't stolen away the only thing that was keeping her sane and normal. Never had Toshiko felt as worthless, not even when she had the mind-reading pendant and she could hear what they all really thought of her. It was true of her - she could hack any computer, decode alien languages in a matter of minutes, and maintain the most concrete of all security systems - but with the day-to-day social interactions and the intricate and delicate constructs of the human heart, she was of no service.

Owen didn't answer Toshiko. He simply started to take Gwen's blood pressure, shaking his head angrily at the readings, trying to piece together the fragments of knowledge in his mind to somehow make sense of the situation and salvage what was left of his reputation as a doctor.

* * *

Jack and Ianto sprinted down the hallway, their guns pointed at the suited man who was holding the mystery tech. Nurses tried to usher their patients back into their rooms, aware that where the elusive Torchwood was involved, people should learn to stay out of their way. The amount of people who came into the hospital weekly with strange bite marks and memory loss could only be connected by one fact - that they were presiding in Cardiff at the time, and were sometimes followed by a man named Ianto who kept a strange stash of circular white pills in his suit-jacket pocket.

"Stop where you are!" Jack shouted for about the fifth time. This young man was certainly putting up a fight, overturning hospital trolleys and unused wheelchairs to obstruct Jack and Ianto. This did not phase them, however. They were thoroughly used to chases, and as well as this young man did run, he was entirely predictable. Like, for example, when he skidded to the left before veering off completely to the right and into the open space. Jack and Ianto leapt through the automatic doors and into the hospital courtyard.

"Where did he go?" Ianto panted, his gun still drawn and at the ready. Unfortunately for the fugitive, the hospital courtyard was cordoned off by a barrier and rose several feet above the ground. In other words, it was a balcony, and there was no escape.

Jack's eyes pointed to a tree that looked have arms. "Got him." He and Ianto side-stepped around the tree, and then, in perfect synchrony, raised their guns on either side of the man's head. The man let out a sigh of dismay and raised his arms. He looked thoroughly disappointed in himself. Jack thrust his gun against his neck, indicating that he was serious.

"What's your name?" Jack growled.

"Alex. Alex Klein," Alex Klein panted, trying to edge away from the end of Jack's pistol.

"What's that in your hand?" Jack pointed to the blinking bit of hardware without looking.

"It's... it's a t-translator," Alex stuttered, still trying to catch his breath. "It can translate all sorts of languages, even assimilate itself to languages it's never come across before. Even alien languages."

"And why do you have it?"

Alex shrugged nonchalantly. "Because it's mine. Or, at least it used to be, before the fall."

"The fall?"

"The fall of Harriet Jones," Alex elucidated. "I used to be her right hand man, her assistant, before she went insane and fired me."

"That happened right after the Sycorax invasion on Christmas Day," Ianto recalled. "She just sort of got really paranoid after the invasion, nobody really knows why. Nobody really knows what happened on that ship."

"I do," Alex said flatly. "I was there. I translated for the Prime Minister and I saw a strange thin man save the world with a satsuma."

Jack raised his eyebrows. "He didn't happen to have a blonde companion, did he?"

Alex nodded at him incredulously. "As a matter of fact, he did."

"But does this have anything to do with what we're dealling with now?" Ianto interrupted. "Why were you up at the isolation ward? Why did you run away from us?"

"Because I was ashamed. And I didn't want you to find out." Alex said, his face pointed at the ground, but keeping eye contact with Jack as the Captain leaned in closer, the gun still pressed into his chin.

"What do you mean?" Jack asked urgently.

Alex sighed defeatedly. "The last time the Sycorax were on earth they were annihilated by Torchwood. Now, they want to return the favour, to Torchwood specifically. And I'm sorry to say but... I've been helping them."

* * *

**A/N: OK, OK. You got me, smart people. The Sycorax is involved. Thanks for ruining the surprise. jks. But I hope you avid Whovians can remember Alex Klein anyway... Harriet Jones's assistant? Had a cool translator thingie? Had the pleasure of having the newly regenerated Doctor whisper sweet nothings in his ear?**

**Please read and review as it only heats up from here. **

**NEXT CHAPTER:**

**- The team reunite to find out what this Alex knows about the Sycorax, and what is happening to the O-negative people in Cardiff.**


	7. Alex's Account

**SYNOPSIS: An illness is sweeping Cardiff that is probably alien, and definitely deadly. With TWO of their team infected and dying, can Torchwood still manage to save their own (and, not to mention, the world)?**

**Thank you so much to the people who've reviewed! :) Keep at it, if you can! (I know it's a long one but it's got some interesting bits to come! But I won't spoil the surprise...)**

_**PREVIOUSLY: Owen is very much annoyed at Gwen for some reason and is having no qualms in showing it. There's a mystery illness somehow sucking the blood out of O-negative people (including Gwen and Tosh) that is also causing nasty bruises all over. Toshiko thinks she's a heartless robot that can't figure out human beings, least of all, Owen. Jack and Ianto tracked down the mystery guy - Alex Klein, who has a secret. He's been helping the Sycorax bring down Torchwood...**_

* * *

"You bloody will not be sticking that in me!" That was the first thing Jack and Ianto heard as they walked Alex back to the stairwell where they had left Owen, Gwen, and Toshiko.

"Right, because your medical acumen far proceeds mine! I forgot you did all those years in... wait, what medical school did you train at again?"

"Come on, guys-"

"Don't get too comfy, Tosh, you're next. Bollocks! Urgh, get back here! Gwen - it's just a bleedin' prick!"

"It not what it is, it's where you want to put it!"

Jack turned the corner to find Gwen squirming away from a considerably large needle which Owen was pointing at her almost threateningly. Toshiko was shrunk back in the corner, holding her arms, biting her lip. Her eyes travelled upwards to meet the Captain who was staring at the ensuing fight between Gwen and Owen inexplicably.

Gwen was the next to notice him. "Jack!" She yelled, finally slipping out of Owen's grasp and running to his side, almost as if Jack would protect her from the needle-wielding medic. Owen rolled his eyes irritably. "He's trying to kill me!"

Owen gave her a seething look. "Bollocks, I am. I'm just trying to take a blood sample."

"And _that_ could kill her," Jack said flatly, motioning for Ianto to come forward from around the corner, holding Alex at gunpoint. "Meet Alex Klein, the man with the answers. He'll tell you why."

Gwen gasped in recognition. "That's the man from the staircase! You got him!"

"Thanks to you," Jack said appreciatively. Owen rolled his eyes at this; he was clearly having a problem with Gwen this morning, Jack noted. He couldn't pinpoint why, though after the messy and almost masochistic affair ended their relationship had never been quite the same. Tosh, on the other hand, he'd taken a sudden shine to. This was not objected to by Tosh in the slightest.

"Right then, who is he?" Gwen asked, approaching the young man with the dark features. He stared at her with a discernable fear in his eyes.

"Why don't you tell them yourself, Alex?" Jack instructed rather than asked. "Tell us all about what you've been doing for the last few years. Go on."

Ianto thrust his gun further into Alex's neck pointedly and he began to speak. "Um... for the past few years..."

"Spit it out, Alex," Jack growled.

"...I've been, uh, making regular contact with the aliens, the Sycorax. I used stolen technology from the Guinevere One space probe program to send them O-negative blood samples in a bid to wipe out Torchwood."

"Wait..." Toshiko stood up shakily to pace towards Alex. "If you've been making alien contact then how did you get past our scanners and satellites? We would have picked up that kind of activity."

"Before Harriet Jones got, uh... demoted... she was working on something called the, uh, subwave network. It was only early progress but I managed to get it up and running - without her knowing, of course. The Sycorax sent me messages direct to my translator."

"Those are standard Torchwood One edition," Toshiko noted.

Alex nodded. "The very same that took down the Sycorax in London on Christmas Day, 2005."

Gwen pursed her lips, trying to remember the disasters had befallen London on Christmas Day, that very unlucky city. "Right. The Sycorax. Were these the ones that almost crashed that big Titanic on London, or the big spider thing that drained the Thames, or the big clump of dirt that smashed the Gherkin building?"

"Big clump of dirt," Jack said, his eyebrows raised to his hairline. "You should remember, they were on the television. Had the whole world in a panic with the party trick they pulled, remember?"

"Rhys was on the roof," Gwen laughed weakly, and then stumbled. "Oh." Jack carefully lowered her back onto the stairwell, staring pointedly at Owen.

"Torchwood killed the Sycorax, or a large portion of them anyway. The Sycorax, in turn, want to kill Torchwood," Jack informed them.

"They've got this blood control thing," Alex explained, with further nudging from Ianto's gun. "Except the last time they used it, the technology was primitive. But they've been planning this for years, ever since they... well, their ship had a sort of a black box thing, like in planes? But the thing is, if something happens to ship, it automatically goes back to where it came from, like a homing pigeon or a boomerang or something. They saw my face on the tape - Harriet Jones couldn't be contacted and neither could the Doctor, Mickey Smith had gone missing, and Rose Tyler was on the list of the dead after Canary Wharf. So, somehow, I don't know how, but they find me. They tune into my translator one night and start sending me these messages. Tell me my family will die if I don't comply to their wishes. So I do what they want me to. I use my old files for when I was working for Harriet Jones and I get something on Torchwood Three. See, they want samples of the blood type that the majority of Torchwood has. And both Toshiko Sato and Suzie Costello come up with O-negative and so I send them the blood."

"I have the same blood type as Suzie?" Gwen asked.

"And me," Toshiko said warily.

"That has got to be rotten luck," Owen muttered.

"Just... hang on," Jack reinforced. "He hasn't even got to the interesting part yet."

Alex nodded, his murky green eyes wide. "I'm not too sure of the plans. They wouldn't just tell me, I don't know how the bruises are formed or how they got there but what I know is this. Whatever they've got is bleeding everyone with O-negative blood dry in the Cardiff area. It's a much more concentrated energy field, which means it's happening more rapidly and intensely than you think."

"So you see, Owen?" Jack said, pulling the large needle out of Owen's grasp. "You were right to predict a loss of blood. You were wrong to try and extract it. They need every last drop they can get right now. And I've spoken to the nurse - blood transfusions don't work. Whatever Gwen and Tosh have in them has to last them till we find a cure. We can't have them running on empty. You're the doctor, you can see why."

Owen gritted his teeth, looking back to Toshiko. Could he have really killed her, if Jack hadn't stopped him in time? She looked more fragile than he had ever seen her, cradling those black-blotted arms of hers, yet she was still determined, her dark eyes focused on Jack, waiting for her next instructions.

"Well, what do we do now, Jack?" Owen asked frustratedly. "We can't just be sitting around here like we're having a tea party, if Tosh and Gwen are in danger then we've got to find whatever it is that is doing this."

"Well, that's pretty easy," Alex piped up, shrugging nonchalantly at the Captain. "The answer has been sitting above your heads since five this morning."

"What?" Jack strode up to him, meeting him eye-to-eye. "What did you say?"

"The Sycorax spaceship," Alex continued, in a rather matter-of-fact tone, "has been up in the sky for some time now. And really, for the famous Torchwood, I honestly cannot believe you haven't noticed."

* * *

**Next Chapter:**

_**WTF? Is this Alex Klein, former assistant to Harriet Jones, completely bonkers or is there really a spaceship hovering over Cardiff that Torchwood itself has managed to overlook?**_

**AND... a preview for chapters to come:**

**- A bumpy car-ride from hell.**

**- Snogging from the unlikely couple.**

**- The hardest of choices.**

**- Aliens! In Cardiff?**

**- Will Gwen and Toshiko be alright? Hmmm... Have tissues at the ready.**


	8. To the Torchwoodmobile!

**SYNOPSIS: An illness is sweeping Cardiff that is probably alien, and definitely deadly. With TWO of their team infected and dying, can Torchwood still manage to save their own (and, not to mention, the world)?**

**Thank you so much to the people who've reviewed! :) Keep at it, if you can! (I know it's a long one but it's got some interesting bits to come! But I won't spoil the surprise...)**

_**PREVIOUSLY: Alex Klein, former assistant to Prime Minister Harriet Jones, and present assistant to the vengeful alien race the Sycorax, has dropped a bombshell on the Torchwood team - is a Sycorax spaceship really, truly floating over Cardiff and has Torchwood really failed to noticed? The Torchwood team has to solve this fast if they are to save Toshiko and Gwen (and not to mention, a sizeable portion of Cardiff's population) in time.**_

* * *

Toshiko was the first to speak. "What do you mean? How could there be a spaceship above us?"

Alex sighed. "It's hard to explain... you wouldn't happen to know what a _perception filter _is, would you?"

The team exchanged jaded glances. "I reckon I might have heard of it somewhere," Owen muttered acerbically.

Alex nodded, not taking notice of the weary and positively annoyed looks on their faces - they had been beaten at their own game. "Well, the spaceship is only small - that's why they were able to apply the perception filter to the entire craft. That's also why it was able to pass through the atmosphere without causing a sonic boom like it did on Christmas Day."

"But that still doesn't explain how it got through without our systems picking it up," Toshiko interrupted, her voice hinting at defense for the atmosphere screening program that she had put in so many hours perfecting.

"You're not the only ones in the universe with access to alien technology," Alex said bluntly, for reasons other than increasingly worsening alien-induced illness, Toshiko felt faint.

"So let me get this straight..." Jack strided forward to stare Alex directly in the eyes. "...what you're saying is that a big - or not so big - alien spaceship has entered the Earth's atmosphere, positioned itself on top of Cardiff, and that we, _alien hunters _with a world of fantastic technology at our fingertips have failed to notice?"

"Yep."

"Ooph, that has got to be a fair blow to our egos," Ianto said dryly, a small smile flickering on his face as he caught the eye of his unsettled and shamefaced Captain.

"So what do we do then?" Gwen asked.

Jack didn't even need to pause to think. "We have to locate this so-called spaceship, if it really is there and destroy it. I assume - energy field as concentrated as this, causing symptoms as strong as this-" (he gestured at Gwen and Tosh) - "that the blood control device is situating somewhere on the spaceship. If we destroy that, everyone is saved."

"Great plan, Jack, but how do you suppose we find this spaceship? If it's already got past _our_ systems won't it be extremely difficult to find?" Owen pointed out pessimistically.

"Well, I can see where you're coming from Owen, but you forget we have our very own secret weapon - " He grinned knowingly as the team turned on him with incredulous expressions. Even Alex was distracted by this, alltogether forgetting that he was even at gunpoint.

"What do you mean, Jack?" Gwen prodded.

"Toshiko Sato," Jack continued proudly. "Our resident technological expert. If there's a cloaking device she hasn't got past I've yet to see it."

Toshiko didn't smile at this - she simply nodded solemnly. "Alright. Let's go then," she said quietly.

"To the Torchwood-mobile!" Ianto shouted absurdly, springing down the stairs with the cold tip of his gun pointed forcedly into the back of Alex's neck.

* * *

Jack swerved almost maniacally through the winding queues of traffic; the equipment in the car was jostling about and hitting various team members and to make manners worse, there was not enough room for all to sit inside the SUV due to limited seating and unlimited kit - Gwen was reduced to having to sit on Owen's lap while Jack and Ianto took the front seats, Alex taking the one on their left and Toshiko taking the one on their right. Toshiko was typing wearily but steadfast into the car's main computer.

"Oh, I'm in! I'm getting heavy signals coming from a clearing just outside the city centre - I'm sending co-ordinates to the car's Direction-Finder now," she announced, pressing her glasses further up her nose as her vision began to fade in and out. "Once we knew the Sycorax was there the scrambling device they're using to mask themselves from our equipment is almost primitive! All it took was for me to access the sub-wave network - if I had known it was active before we would have found the signals hours ago!"

"Thanks Tosh," said Jack appreciatively, full of respect for his colleague who was still behaving every bit the professional, even through her illness. It was more than he could say for the others, namely Gwen and Owen. Between Gwen's shitty mood at being sick and helpless and Owen's anger at his earlier misdiagnosis, the two were squabbling and bickering like children.

"Would you stop squirming, Gwen?" Owen yelled as the car went around yet another bend.

"I'm not squirming, Owen, it's a ... combination of Jack's bloody erratic driving and being unrestrained!" Gwen protested, the seatbelt refusing to hold the both of them in one place as the powerful SUV veered off to the right. She bounced and slid on his knees, causing pain for the both of them.

"I'll restrain you in a minute," Owen muttered under his breath.

"See, everyone always asks me why there are always no more than five people at Torchwood Three... ooh, Jack, there's a huge rift in space and running underneath Cardiff, don't you think you need a stronger line of defence? What if millions of Weevils start roaming the streets or something?" Jack mocked a whiny, decidedly feminine voice. "I'll tell you why there aren't anymore people in Torchwood Three. It's because there's not enough room in the SUV!"

"This is like an episode of Jerry Springer, a bit," Alex remarked, cowering uncomfortably in his seat from the fighting duo.

"For crying out loud, Gwen!" Owen shouted as they veered around another bend.

"Oi! Don't be thinking this is the most comfortable ride!" Gwen continue to argue. "Sitting on you, you're so bony, it's like sitting on a bed of nails or a frozen chicken carcass!"

Ianto suddenly burst out laughing from the front seat, gasping for air, spluttering something about "you guys!" and "frozen chicken!". His face was a bright shade of scarlet as he turned around to face his entertainment. Toshiko stared at the three of them sternly through her magenta-rimmed glasses, though they didn't seem to notice her glares. What's more, they didn't seem to get how much danger they were really in.

"Now don't you start," Jack warned him. "Gwen, why don't you save some of that energy, huh?"

Gwen looked like she was about to retaliate, but, feeling the onset of dizziness, she nodded complacently and actually started to settle into Owen's bony lap. Relaxing, Owen even put his hands around her waist, pulling her tighter and closer to him so that her head wouldn't loll about and hit the equipment every time Jack hit a bump on the road or took a sharp turn. She leaned her head back onto his shoulder, and closed her eyes, tired.

"Gwen?" Jack called from the front street, hitting a mainly vacant road and speeding along it, his eyes only just catching the rear-view mirror. "Don't go to sleep on us now, we're nearly there. Keep feeding me those co-ordinates, Tosh," he reminded his stoically working team member.

"It's just along this road, and then there's a series of apartment blocks. Beyond that there's a clearing, that's where the signal is the strongest," Tosh said, rolling up her sleeves to type faster. Owen took her arm away from the keyboard, studying it closely. "What are you doing, Owen?"

"It's just..." Owen turned her arm over, following the pattern of the black oval-shaped bruises along with his fingers. They were grouped in rows of four, with a distinct outlier below each row. Owen put his hand along the markings, and then groaned in recognition as his fingers seemed to slot into place. "These are fingerprints, these bruises! How the fuck did that happen?"

Tosh took back her arm, cradling it and looking closer. It was the same on the other arm. "You're right! But I... that is unusual."

"Ah, jeez," Jack moaned from the front seat. "I know how it happened. I'm sorry, Tosh, really, I am."

"What do you mean, Jack?"

Jack shook his head. "I was trying to hold you up, you had just fainted. I just didn't know I had such a firm grip."

"You don't," said Owen flatly. "Their blood has lost the capacity to clot, it can't repair wounds anymore or anything. This is serious though, if fingerprints can leave a mark, they've got no chance against cuts or gashes or serious blows. Urgh, Gwen must have got hers when she fell, Jack. They're probably everywhere on her. Shit. I knew we should have given them both a full-body check-up."

"In your dreams," Gwen murmured faintly, her head still tilted back and using Owen's shoulder as pillow. Ianto stifled a laugh - even in the face of death, the Torchwood team wouldn't put up with Owen's slimy come-ons.

"And her eye?" Jack asked.

"Probably just rubbed it or something."

Jack's jaw clenched and he continued to stare ahead for the rest of the car ride, pulling over at the side of a small clearing, loading his gun and snatching the translation device out of Alex's hands.

"We'll take this now," he said with enough authority to make a Weevil cower. He took out a pair of silver bracelets from his coat pocket, slapping one onto Alex's wrist and one onto Toshiko's. "If you move more than ten feet away from her you'll get zapped with 10,000 bolts of electricity."

Alex gaped, staring at the limiting bracelet which was now deadlocked onto his arm.

" Not that you have a choice but you're going to stay here with Gwen and Tosh, we'll keep our comms open at all times, you call us immediately if anything changes," Jack instructed.

"Immediately," Owen reinforced, unbuckling the seatbelt and sliding out from under Gwen. She sunk back into the seat, barely conscious.

"Don't we get to come with?" She mumbled, barely able to put up a fight.

Jack stared at her patronizingly. "No." Then he turned to Owen and Ianto, who were outside the SUV, guns and equipment at the ready, waiting for their orders. "Let's scope the entire area, there's some sort of electromagnetic pulse running right through here, but it's messing with our equipment."

After about a minute wandering about with tracking devices that had been rendered useless, Owen, Ianto and Jack converged in the middle of the clearing, hands on hips, trying think of something -anything that could work, for the sake of Gwen and Toshiko.

"It's no use, our equipment is jammed," Ianto said, tapping the screen of his device, which was displaying static.

Jack frantically pressed buttons on his scanner, staring at the flickering screen. "But the translator is still working, perhaps it's too small to be detected." Then he turned to Owen, solemn. "Gwen and Tosh... I know they put up a front. They're really not alright, are they?"

Owen swallowed hard; he shook his head gravely. "They're losing blood, Jack. Tosh is acting strong, but those bruises look darker and more painful than Gwen's look, like they could lead to internal bleeding if we're not careful. Gwen on the other hand is taking the oxygen deprivation harder - she's on the brink of collapse, really, though she'd never admit it. She has been since the hospital."

Jack remembered how Gwen had struggled up the stairs and how breathess she had been at the top of them, doubling over and trying to catch her breath, stumbling backwards into the wall. They should have taken them back to the Hub to get extensive treatment the moment he realised how weak they both were. And as for Toshiko - Jack was still trying to get his mind around the fact that he had hurt her. The fact that she could be bleeding internally now because of him absolutely killed him. "How long have they got?" He asked Owen seriously.

Owem clenched his teeth together, the words seemed to worm their way through. "Minutes."

Just as Jack was about to respond, a strange feeling overcame the three men. It felt as if their blood was urging upwards, and their bodies were rapidly losing mass as they stood. Surrounding them was an aura of electric-blue light, carrying them upwards. In seconds, they were travelling blindingly and unfathomably fast through the air, as mere scattered particles in space.

* * *

**Next: It's a race to save Gwen and Tosh - but where on earth have Jack, Owen and Ianto gone?**

**A/N: Huge chapter, I know. But the first part was boring and I was ITCHING to get the rest of it up! Please read and review, I really enjoyed writing this installment. Would love some feedback on how you guys are wanting the fic to turn out - I have some ideas in my head but I want to know first what the general concensus is... Could a character death be in it's sights? And seriously, any criticism too, I'll be grateful for it.**

**BTW Anyone recognize Jack's limiting bracelets from a certain episode of Doctor Who? :)**


	9. The Trouble with Teleports

**SYNOPSIS: An illness is sweeping Cardiff that is probably alien, and definitely deadly. With TWO of their team infected and dying, can Torchwood still manage to save their own (and, not to mention, the world)?**

**A/N: Wooh, it's been a while. I know. The festive season is so busy. But here it is - chapter nine. Special thanks to my new (and first) beta reader, __****Gwen Harkness **who has provided smashing literary support for the last few chapters which I wanted to be just right (or close enough to it). See if you can catch the Face of Boe reference in this... 

_**PREVIOUSLY: After an uncomfortable car-ride with former assistant to former PM Harriet Jones Alex Klein in the prisoner's seat, Jack, Owen and Ianto were set and determined to find the blood control device that was making Toshiko and Gwen so ill, with life-threatening blood loss and dangerous bruises. But something has gone awry - with the three men have disappeared in nowhere...**__**

* * *

**_

Gwen watched wearily as Jack, Owen and Ianto scoured the area for whatever they might find. Whatever might help in the fight against the Sycorax. Even from afar, she could tell by their body language that there had been little success. Her eyelids drooped lazily as her focus drifted. She didn't understand how Tosh was still doing it - typing steadfastly on her computer as if she wasn't getting the blood slowly drawn out of her, as if her arms weren't covered in painful bruises that were spreading like ink on her skin. Gwen had always secretly thought of Toshiko as a bit of a workaholic, but this was insane. Tosh was manually scanning for energy signatures and the least Gwen could do was lift her head up.

She continued watching the men. After circling for a little while longer, she saw the three of them come together in the middle of the field. They were holding out their devices and talking, Jack probably reassuring that he had a plan, Owen perhaps giving a snide comment here or there, Ianto remaining ever cool and professional, she guessed. Then suddenly, an electric-blue light beamed down from above and they were gone.

"What the hell?" Gwen gasped, leaning forward in her chair, blinking hard to check that what she had seen wasn't an illusion. "Tosh!" She yelled, her hands flying to cup her face.

"What?" Toshiko didn't look up from her computer, and looked quite uninterested.

"Tosh, they just... they just disappeared!" She exclaimed, frowning with confusion. Her eyes were wide and she pointed madly out the window at the empty field.

Toshiko finally looked up, glancing out the window to where Jack, Owen and Ianto had stood only moments ago. "That's impossible," she whispered in astonishment, lowering her glasses to the tip of her nose and craning to peer out of the glass.

Alex peered out the window, his hands pressing against the glass, his eyes frantically searching the expanse. "Where did they go?" He asked in a strangled, horrified voice. "_Where did they go_?"

* * *

There was a sickening couple of seconds in which they weren't even sure of their corporeal forms and there was an unbelievable sense of dizziness.

They were falling, falling... Their stomachs were in their throats and their brains seemed to turn to water. Nothing was real, nothing was apparent, nothing was there - nothing except for an ear-piercing screech hammering on their ear drums wildly.

And then an awful _crunch_.

Ianto felt an unbearable, throbbing pain radiating across his forehead and his nose. A warm liquid was running down his chin, which he quickly identified as blood. His nose was bloody - he had crushed it against some kind of hard, flat surface in an impact that was still not entirely sure about.

"You alright, mate?" He heard Owen's voice, panting and slightly shaky but altogether Owen-like in its Londoner-accent and seedy quality.

He grabbed out blindly. It was like resurfacing from water. The sights, the sounds felt blurry and subdued and he had to strain against his senses to make them out. He felt himself being helped upright.

"Yeah," Ianto moaned, trying to stem the bleeding from his nose with his two fingers, but it was tender to touch and the pain was still coursing through his entire face. He felt tears threatening to form in his eyes, and he blinked hard, desperate to salvage that was left of his dignity.

"You've broken your nose," Owen observed, pointing to the pulsing, throbbing area in the middle of Ianto's face, and Ianto had a sudden urge for a mirror, hoping that he hadn't damaged it for good. "You smashed head first into the wall."

"What wall?" Ianto asked, straightening up. His surroundings were finally coming into focus now. He could tell they were in some sort of a confined space, a corridor perhaps? All he could see was a red-brown colour, a matte surface with a slightly jagged pattern of grooves and platforms. It was like some sort of a cave, and Ianto could see the spot of blood on the wall where he had smacked his head. "Where are we?"

"Beats me," Owen said flatly, shrugging. Owen was also gingerly touching his face - his right cheek was badly grazed and had bits of dust and rock in the wound, but he was otherwise alright as far as Ianto could see.

Ianto realised then that Jack wasn't talking to him, in fact, he wasn't even in sight. He looked around quickly before his eyes fell on his Captain. Jack was crouched up against the wall, his leg extended away from him.

"What happened?" Ianto gasped, stepping in closer. Jack looked up at him, his usual grin warped with the obvious signs of pain. A sheen of sweat had appeared on his forehead and Jack looked unusually pale. Ianto felt this chest tighten, even though he was aware of Jack's immortality. Whatever it was, it couldn't be permanent. But it still hurt to see someone you loved in pain.

"Unstable teleport," Jack groaned, grimacing. He shot a rueful glance at his leg. That was when Ianto realised that Jack was missing something, and he was shocked that he missed it himself - he really must have hit his head hard. There was blood gushing from the stump where Jack's leg should have been, and the gash was jagged and unevenly severed. The white of his shin bone was protruding from the raw flesh.

"Your foot ... is _gone_!" Ianto cried, looking slightly faint. He reached out for the cave wall to support himself while his free hand flew to his mouth in shock.

"You think?" Jack said weakly. "The teleport must have scrambled the transfer. That's why the landing was so hard."

"Which means his foot could be anywhere," Owen explained, sufficiently grossed out but also hinting at amusement. He was also considerably calm about the fact that Jack was writhing in pain and losing a lot of blood. They had seen him in agony and come back from dead so often now that nothing truly phased Owen when it came to Jack. Besides, with his job as Torchwood's medical officer and coroner, a day just didn't seem normal unless he had witnessed or come across something truly and mind-scarringly revolting.

"Well, it's a short-range teleport, I'm guessing," Jack said, still wincing and squirming. "So I don't think it could be anywhere outside Cardiff."

"We should really compress that wound," Owen said, taking off his leather jacket. "I left my medical gear in the car so I'll have to use bits of material." He started to rip away strips from his shirt.

"Owen, no. Just wait," Jack stopped him.

"But you don't have a foot! You're bleeding!" Ianto exclaimed, panicking.

"It's okay... Just _wait_," Jack said, breathing in deeply. He sat, his eyes fixed onto his injured leg. Surely enough, before their very eyes, the flesh started to replenish itself. It wasn't long before a whole new foot was grown out of the bloodied stump, toes and all. Jack looked up at both of them pointedly once the whole process was over. "See?"

"You're like a starfish," Owen said finally, gaping at his new foot. "They can grow back extra limbs too. Though that's a marvel of evolution - you're just _wrong_."

"Thanks," Jack muttered sarcastically. "And that's not the first time I've been told that. You alright, Ianto?"

Ianto looked pale and alarmed as he stared at Jack's new foot. Plus, he was still bleeding a significant amount from his nose, the red dripping down his chin and onto his new suit.

"He's been trying the head-on approach," Owen quipped, before grabbing Jack's arm and helping him to his partially new set of feet.

* * *

"It was some sort of short-range teleport!" Toshiko exclaimed, leaning in closer to peer at the readings on her computer. Gwen stretched across Alex to stare at the readings too, even though she couldn't possibly decipher what they meant. The technical stuff was more of Tosh's area of expertise. "Something's taken them," Toshiko said grimly, biting her lip.

"Can we get them back?" Gwen asked urgently.

"As far as I can tell the teleport stream is still open, all someone needs to do is access the frequency," Toshiko told her.

"Then why aren't they coming back? Jack could use his wrist thingy, right? That would work?"

"Yes, any kind of computer within close range should be able to manipulate the stream. Jack's wrist, uh, thing could work just fine."

Gwen stared into the sky helplessly, searching the heavens for the men she was so sure would bring them out of this mess. Ironically, it looked as if they might now be the ones that needed saving. "Then where are they? Surely Jack would have figured that out!"

Toshiko eyed Gwen steelily, pushing her glasses up her nose as she lowered her head to catch Gwen's panicked glance. "Gwen, calm down. Jack knows what he's doing."

* * *

"If I were to cut off your head, would it grow back? Like could I keep the old one in a jar and you would have to look at your own pickled head every day?" Owen asked, smirking. For the past couple of minutes he had been treating Jack's, uh, foot regeneration as a kind of medical marvel asking Jack how it worked, and pointing out the endless possibilities that the human body had in store for someone with the same indestructibility as Jack.

"I don't know, but I suppose, yeah," Jack said. "Please don't, though. That would _not_ be a fun experience for me... I don't think I ever want to end up with my head in a jar..."

"But can you imagine Jack without a head, Ianto? It might be a nice change of pace."

"Can we please stop talking about cutting various parts of Jack off?" Ianto begged, still looking extraordinarily pale. He had managed to stop most of the bleeding by holding the end of his tie around his nose and applying the slightest amount of pressure, but he still looked a mess. Jack gave him a sympathetic look, only knowing how much that would affect Ianto. Ianto got tetchy about lint and people using cold drinks without coasters, so Jack understood that the sheer fact that Ianto was bleeding down his face and onto his clothes ought to be tugging hard on his emotions.

"Stop, Owen. You're freaking him out. Like if he ever pisses you off he's going to wake up with my severed head in his bed or something."

"Oh, yeah, like in the Godfather! That would be classic, can you imagine?"

"I'd rather not," said Ianto coldly. "Jack, one question. Where are we going?"

They walked down the corridor, an odd sight, seen as Jack was only wearing one shoe, slowly with their guns drawn out in front of them. As far as they could tell the place was deserted, and the further they walked, the darker it became until all they could see was the tiny fluorescent blue light on Jack's earpiece, which had been rendered nonfunctional upon entering the place. Comms were down, something was setting Jack's nerves on edge because that meant that they couldn't be contacted if something were to happen to the girls. He hoped it wouldn't, but there was still that unsettled, sickly feeling in the pit of his stomach. Hopefully now they might find some answers, and a way to stop the condition.

"There's an energy reading at the end of this corridor," Jack explained. "If we follow it, we might just find the blood control device."

"You think it might be here?" Owen asked.

"Yeah, it would only make sense. This place is definitely Sycoraxian. All that technology and they still prefer to live in caves."

"Let's go then," Owen said urgently, picking up his pace. "Did anyone bring a torch? I can't see a bloody thing in here."

"All our stuff is back at the SUV," Ianto said. Owen muttered something incoherent and most probably filthy under his breath. "We couldn't have known we would end up here," Ianto continued, although he too was wishing they had come better prepared.

"We could have at least brought torches."

"Did you bring a torch?"

"No."

"Well, shut up then."

Suddenly, a wailing siren sounded and the three men looked around frantically in the darkness, fumbling for anything solid, even eachother.

"What the hell?" Jack yelled over the alarm.

A harsh red light came down from above and they were suddenly surrounded by walls of crackling energy. Ianto reached out his hand to touch the sparking, translucent red veil, but Jack quickly grabbed him out of the way.

"No!" Jack told him fiercely. Slowly and carefully, Jack took off his remaining shoe, and with a pointed glance at Owen and Ianto, threw it into the barrier surrounding them. They watched warily as the boot disintegrated amongst the flying sparks.

"Okay, won't touch it," Ianto said, holding his arms closer to him.

"This is a trap," Owen pointed out the obvious. "Can you disable it with your wrist... thing?"

Jack pressed a few buttons on his vortex manipulator determinedly, and then threw up his arms. "Nope, it's not working. This is a well-fortified electro-cell. I've seen them before - they're virtually impossible to breach."

"Brilliant," Owen said snidely, crossing his arms over his chest.

"_SO PANDAK KRYEZ STAT FORAXI! BOL SO MIGACH ME CHACKCHIFF_!" A rasping, booming voice suddenly blasted their eardrums.

"What the hell was that?" Owen yelled, covering his ears. Jack suddenly whipped out the translator he had stolen from Alex. It was beeping and lighting up wildly. He scanned the translation quickly, before reading it aloud to Owen and Ianto.

"You have made it onboard. Prepare to die," Jack recited. Ianto sided closer to the Captain, feeling the blood draw out of his face and the hairs standing up on his forearms. Owen stopped pouting and leapt to Jack's side, checking the translator for himself. He felt a horrid nausea when Jack's words turned out to be true.

As the Sycoraxian words sounded, they appeared in English on the screen. He continued to read for the next minute:

"_We left in peaceful conformity to your terms, in accordance with the ancient battle rituals. We surrendered to your will and left in peace. But you slaughtered us like animals. You, Torchwood, the defenders of the human race. The boy tells us of your downfall and of your small numbers. So we come for the remnants of your institution. You will die at our hands, and the vulnerable world will kneel before us. You are trapped and weak. Your bodies will perish like the thousands of Sycorax that burnt on the day you humans call Christmas. Scream and weep all you want - our Black Box recorders will replay it to both our worlds on the day of the Earth's downfall. Goodbye, esteemed Torchwood. You have three minutes to live_."

* * *

**Next: Every single member of the team is in more danger than ever before - and with them all split up who will be the one to have to save the day? And will it be too late for some?**

**Feedback? Thoughts? I love to hear them all.**


	10. The Countdown Begins

**SYNOPSIS: An illness is sweeping Cardiff that is probably alien, and definitely deadly. With TWO of their team infected and dying, can Torchwood still manage to save their own (and, not to mention, the world)?**

**Thank you so much to the people who've reviewed! I won't name names but you know who you are. And sorry for taking so long, life and all that. I've had this ready for a while but there was a mix-up with my beta (my fault entirely) and well... it's here now. Reviews are wonderful so please let me know what you think. **

**_PREVIOUSLY: Jack, Ianto and Owen went a-searching for a cure for Gwen and Tosh's condition - where they losing blood without bleeding - but got taken away by a Sycoraxian teleport that was a bit shoddy - Jack lost a foot and Ianto broke his nose on the way up. Gwen and Tosh and former assistant to former PM Harriet Jones are working to get them back when - the guys' worst fears are confirmed. This was a trap, an act of revenge on Torchwood for killing thousands of Sycorax on that Christmas Day, and the entire spaceship is set to blow up in three minutes with the team still inside it..._****_

* * *

_**Toshiko was still helplessly trying to reverse the teleport when a dialogue window flashed onto the screen.

"What's that?" asked Gwen.

"It's some sort of message - broadcasted over the subwave network," Toshiko said. "I opened the subwave right after Alex told me about his little espionage." She glanced at Alex irritably out of the corner of her eye.

"Well, open it," said Gwen, biting her bottom lip.

Toshiko clicked on the dialogue window and suddenly they were covering their ears from the guttural, grating, blaring alien voice.

"What the hell is that?" Gwen yelled over the sounds and Toshiko began typing frenziedly once it had stopped.

"The computer identifies the language as Sycoraxian," Toshiko announced almost excitedly. "And it just so happens that that language is stored on our computer's translation banks so..." - She typed a string of codes and a program appeared onscreen - "... All I have to do is run the recorded message through the system and..."

A block of text appeared on the screen in plain English. "There."

Toshiko enlarged the text and swung the computer in front of Alex, so that they could all huddle in front of the screen and read it.

"_We left in peaceful conformity to your terms_," Alex began to mouth the words softly. Toshiko waved him quiet and they each began to read the text as it had been translated.

"Oh my god," Gwen said finally, her hands cupped around her face. "They're going to kill them."

"Never mind that," Alex dismissed her, his eyes frantic and intense. "They're going to take over the world!"

* * *

Jack, Ianto and Owen stood helplessly from the cell as the countdown rapidly ensued. Owen couldn't believe his luck. And it didn't help that Ianto kept reminding them.

"Two minutes thirty," he announced, glancing at his ever-handy stopwatch ruefully.

"Well, fuck it, " Owen muttered, staring at the red-brown cave floor beneath them. "We're all going to die."

"Not all of us." Ianto reminded them all of Jack's immortality.

"You're not going to die," said Jack firmly, hugging his arms across his chest. That was a habit of his when he was nervous, and with the light from the walls of their cells illuminating the couple of square metres around them, Jack could no longer hide the panicked expression on his face.

"How do you know that?" Owen said bitterly.

"Do you have an idea, Jack?" Ianto asked eagerly, only to have the Captain turn away from him.

"I'm working on it, Ianto. We've beaten the Sycorax before, when it was a major colony. This is just one cell. One tiny... electro-charged... well-fortified cell."

"We're all going to die," Ianto said flatly.

"Well, then, we'd better not waste our last moments," Jack murmured, taking Ianto's face in his hands and kissing him passionately, to which Ianto was very obliging. Owen sunk against the wall, scowling.

"Right, so we're all going to die and you two get to spend your last moments kissing eachother? Who's going to kiss me?" Owen muttered bitterly, before Jack, with a smirk of malice on his face, turned around, grabbed Owen's neck and snogged him too. Owen shouted through the kiss, squirming away from Jack. Jack laughed; Ianto's expression was unreadable, but it hinted of mirth and just a touch of jealousy.

"Oi! Gerroffmee!" Owen gasped, pointing his finger warningly at Jack and shaking his head. "Man, that is disgusting. Who knows where those lips have been?"

"God only knows," Ianto said soberly.

Jack laughed at Owen, who was wiping his mouth clean vigorously.

"Jack?" Ianto interrupted, solemn but calm in the face of death. "When this whole thing blows, the blood control device will too, won't it?"

Jack knew what Ianto was thinking because he was thinking it too. "Yes, Ianto. Gwen and Tosh will be released. At least some of us will survive this."

* * *

"Tosh, you have to override that teleport!" Gwen commanded.

"Why?" Toshiko asked, already typing furiously into the computer, obeying Gwen's orders.

"Just do it." Gwen told her, staring forward determinedly. "I have an idea."

"I'm in!" Toshiko exclaimed, half-laughing. "It seems these so-called Sycorax are pretty useless when it comes to security... but Gwen, what are you going to do?" She turned to her colleague with that mixed look of expectation and fear that she usually reserved for when Jack was being reckless, but now that she really thought about it, Gwen was pretty impulsive too.

Gwen reached for her gun and slid out of the car shakily. "I'm going up."

"Gwen!" Tosh cried out after her, almost in exasperation. "You can't! You're not strong enough!"

Gwen shot her a look of unamused defiance. "Just get me up there."

It was a waste of time to argue with her, and Toshiko wasn't sure that she had the strength. So she pursed her lips and put on an air of ignorance to Gwen's actions and she began to type rapidly, already forsaking responsibility for what might happen next. Although, she knew that if Jack came back and found that something had happened to Gwen simply because Toshiko hadn't been bothered to lock horns with her, Jack would never forgive her. She was already sensing that this would end badly - she watched as Gwen staggered into the middle of the clearing where the others were last seen, only to rest her hand on her knee, extending the other in a very wobbly thumbs-up at Toshiko.

Toshiko shook her head, regretting already what she was about to do. "Alright..." Toshiko pressed the return key and waited. "Recalibrating the particle transfer field, focusing and shifting the energy feedback-"

"Stop the teleport," Alex suddenly growled, and Toshiko felt something cold and metallic press against her stomach. She looked down and saw a small knife pointed towards her. Alex was breathing heavily, his teeth gritted together, his eyes dark and wide.

"Alex, what are you doing?" Toshiko exclaimed, trying to edge away from the tip of the blade, but she was cornered.

"I don't want to hurt you, just stop the teleport," Alex said menacingly, pressing the knife down. She could feel its point pierce through the outer layer of her shirt and come to contact with her skin, but it didn't cut.

"It's too late," Toshiko whispered, desperately trying to keep her cool. She pointed through the open door of the SUV at the beam of electric blue light that took Gwen away in seconds. Alex stared after it into the sky, letting his focus drift, leaving Toshiko with the opportunity to fumble for her gun. As she pulled it out from underneath her seat, she found Alex with the knife pointed directly at her throat.

"You could have stopped it," he snarled threateningly. "I warned you but you didn't listen."

Toshiko tried to squirm away from the knife's edge; Alex was running it down her throat, letting the cool metal blade only slightly coming into contact with her skin as he positioned it with care above her heart. He raised the handle, ready to strike...

In a moment of pure adrenaline, Toshiko squeezed the trigger of the gun still in her hand and Alex screamed, realising that Toshiko had shot him in the shoulder, just askew of her aim. Blood spattered around the interior of the SUV; Alex shouted and grasped wildly at his shoulder.

"You bitch!" He screamed, wiping the blood away from his neck.

Panting and shaking his head at her vengefully, he raised the knife rapidly with his uninjured arm, plunging it just below her ribcage. Toshiko yelped, and clutched her hands to where the knife still lay in her, the hot blood already seeping into her shirt, having the consistency of scarlet water. Alex twisted the knife inside her, making Toshiko scream in agony, and pulled it out rapidly, wiping the blood off on his pants. He grinned at her through the pain of his own wound.

"Disable the bracelets," he ordered, raising the knife again. Toshiko nodded tearily and weakly keyed in a combination of buttons on her bracelet. They both cracked open and fell off their wrists.

"Good girl," sneered Alex.

"What are you going to do to me?" Toshiko gasped.

"I'm going to fulfill my promise," said Alex, and he stood up out of the car awkwardly. He used his good arm to drag Toshiko out of the car by the leg and drop her carelessly to the ground.

"Just so you don't decide to do anything sneaky," Alex smirked, holding down the interior locks of the SUV and slamming the door shut. He waved goodbye to Toshiko and began to stagger towards the Cardiff city area, still clutching at his shoulder, and leaving her in a heap on the grass, bleeding into the earth. Amazingly, she was still conscious, but this simply meant that she felt everything. She clutched at the dirt beneath her fingers as the pain spread through her and her blood lapped out onto the ground. She could feel it. She was breathing hard, but she was still breathing. That was something.

If she could just manage to - she was a few miles off the town centre but the main road was right across the field... If she could just manage to get herself there then maybe somebody would see her, maybe someone would stop and get her some help. She tried to push herself upwards with her lower arms but she was weak, almost unconscious. The only thing keeping her conscious was the pain, searing where Alex had stabbed her.

_So this was it_, she thought. The end of a life she'd only just begun, really. Or hadn't even begun at all. This Torchwood life was exciting and enlightening and all other kinds of magic, but who was she fooling? She would give it all up just to see her family again.

Just to get a second chance at life. A normal life. Perhaps even then she could be normal, or at least, try her best at it. She could go on dates without wondering if the date in question was just using her to get into the Hub, or whether the date would be cut short by a fissure in the Rift or an outbreak of aliens in Butetown.

She could love, and maybe even be loved back, if she was lucky. She could settle down, by a flat that wouldn't be empty and cold on the inside because it would be shared between the two of them, and she could get married and have children and just live. That was her plan all along, wasn't it? Until her mother was kidnapped she was just an ordinary twenty-something year old Japanese girl with a knack for maths and logic and a family that loved her.

It was all flooding forward, into the forefront of her mind now, and she felt the sobs escaping her, exacerbating her wound as she cried...

The painful memories of a life spent endeavouring for the chance, the feeling, the connection - all ending in tears and frustration with the deaths of those she'd found the courage to love. And the even more painful memories of a life wasted. All that time to get it out there in the open, and Toshiko had never once told Owen how she really felt about him.

"Owen." She whispered his name hopelessly, wishing him to come, but he never would, she knew that. Now, she was going to die, alone, bleeding profusely, broken. Because she couldn't connect. Because she didn't have the courage or the capacity to sustain a relationship. Because they always ended in pain.

There was no use in screaming for help. As much as she wanted to deny it, nobody ever really came for poor, pathetic, lonely little Tosh.

* * *

**Next: Does Toshiko survive? Do any of them survive? How on earth are they going to get out of this one?**

**Suggestions?**


	11. An Impossible Choice

**SYNOPSIS: An illness is sweeping Cardiff that is probably alien, and definitely deadly. With TWO of their team infected and dying, can Torchwood still manage to save their own (and, not to mention, the world)?**

_**PREVIOUSLY: Well, the Sycorax trying to kill off her best buddies was never going to bode well with Gwen. So while three men were busy sulking about their impending doom, she ordered Tosh to get her up into the spaceship/prison/ticking timebomb. She didn't know how dearly Tosh would pay for that deed though, as Alex Klein, former assistant to former PM Harriet Jones was not too happy with Gwen inevitably angering the aliens further and stabbed Tosh in stomach! She is alone and frightened as she desperately clings to life...**_

* * *

Jack had once told Gwen that the wriststrap he wore once had the power to the teleport, and ever since she had been extremely interested by it and by teleportation in general. But this was not how she had imagined it. It was a stomach-churning, sickening to the point of excruciation, blinding strip through nothingness. She had never felt something so horrific. Even though she was sure she was transported within seconds, those seconds stretched onward in a some kind of surreal world where she wasn't even conscious of her own corporeal body - not until, with a sickening crunch, she found herself hurled against a concrete wall.

* * *

"What was that?" Jack asked, waving both of them quiet with his hands. Up until this point Ianto had been assuring himself aloud that they would be able to escape this somehow, while, Owen, conversely, was bitterly recounting every missed opportunity in his life.

"What?"They both asked, Ianto eager and wide-eyed, Owen simply growling.

"I think it was a scream," Jack said, shushing them again. Ianto craned his neck, trying to listen, his face a mask of determination.

Surely, they could hear someone in the distance - a woman - what was it? Crying? Moaning? She sounded like she was in pain.

"That's Gwen," Ianto said suddenly, and Jack's jaw grew even tighter, as he recognized it too. Owen looked up at them both.

And with a strike of perfect unison the three of them each began to yell.

* * *

She was sure she had screamed. It was an awful pain shooting up her side where she had landed. Her hipbone had collided with the hard surface and was consequently on fire. She had to lie there for a couple of seconds, simply catching her breath and trying not to cry. She may have been a Torchwood agent but she was not impervious to pain. Slowly, with complete determination she rocked herself into a seated position and began to assess her surroundings. She was in a tunnel somewhere, or somewhere that looked like a tunnel. It was hardly lit, and she couldn't see any further than ten metres on either side of her. The walls were made of a kind of brown, ridged stone, and from what she had felt, they were quite solid. The floors were made of the same material, and were very wet where she sat. She turned over her hands and peered at them in the dim light, glistening with the liquid. It wasn't water - it was dark. She should have known immediately what it was from the smell but it took a couple of seconds to register. She had been lying in a pool of blood.

She quickly checked that it wasn't her own blood pouring out of her, and, quickly remembered her mission. The pain in her side + blood loss had made her delirious, forgetful. She scrambled to her feet. The blood on the floor was not her own but it was the blood of one of her friends. Jack, Ianto, or Owen. One of them was injured and all of them were in extreme danger. She began to run awkwardly down the tunnel, limpingly slightly, but pushing forwards, blindly pursuing their calls. She could hear their voices now. They were calling her and she wasn't going to let them down.

* * *

"Gwen? Gwen!" Jack called for the umpteenth time. "Damnit, where is she?"

Owen nodded bleakly. "I know. This is the Titanic and she's supposed to be our lifeboat."

Jack shot him a look. "I meant she should get herself to safety."

"And let us all die?" Owen scowled. "She might as well go down fighting."

"Shuttup!" Ianto hollered, and nodded his head towards the darkness. "_Listen_."

They quickly silenced. They could hear echoes of someone gasping in the darkness.

"Gwen?" Jack yelled at the top of his lungs.

There was a brief silence, and then a smaller, shakier voiced replied: "Jack!"

Jack was noticeably pale as Gwen turned the corner, lit slightly by the crackling orange light of the forcefield. Her clothing was seeped in blood.

"_What are you doing here_?" He growled.

"Why aren't you wearing shoes?" She countered.

Ianto waved his stopwatch at Gwen frantically. "We've under a minute!"

"Right," said Gwen. "Any idea what I should be looking for?"

"You didn't bring equipment with you?" Owen gaped.

"There wasn't time," Gwen said, and began fumbling for the walls.

"What the hell are you looking for?" Owen shouted.

"An off-switch!" said Gwen, running her hands along the surface.

"This is a high-security prison, Gwen! There's not going to just be an off-switch!"

Suddenly Gwen's hands found something smooth and round and pink jutting out of the rough wall. She punched it with considerable gusto and the forcefield crackled away.

They all stood there in dumb astonishment until Ianto shouted "Thirty-seconds!" and they began to sprint blindly down the corridor, hitting walls but not caring.

"We're going to make it!" Owen cried out in amazement as they turned a final corner.

"C'mon!" Jack said to Gwen, as he grabbed her by the arm and pulled her through the final length of the tunnel. With each of them standing in the teleport hotspot, Jack pressed a couple of buttons on his wrist-strap.

* * *

Teleportation was no less easy on the return trip. The four of them were flung into the air before landing heavily on the grass with a thud. After catching his breath, Jack crawled to where Gwen was lying on her back, dazed and struggling to breathe. Her eyes were drifting lazily, struggling to focus.

"We're alive," she gasped, making no conceivable efforts to sit up.

"Thanks to you," said Jack, grinning.

"And to Tosh," said Gwen. "Where is she?"

They turned their heads towards the car. Owen was bent down on the ground, with Ianto sprinting to catch up. Ianto then turned around and called Jack, his hands fleeting to cup his face for only a second, and then sprung into action, unlocking the SUV's boot and fetching armfuls of equipment to bring to Owen. Toshiko was lying on the ground next to Owen, and she was bleeding.

Jack turned back to Gwen, expecting his horrified expression reflected on her face, but she was still and her eyes were closed. He called her name but got no response. Leaning in, he knew she wasn't breathing. The unsteady rise and fall in chest had come to a stop.

"Jack, I need you!" Owen yelled, and Jack tore his attention back to Tosh, who was lying limp. Owen waved him over with bloody hands. "I need you over here _now_!"

Jack was almost tempted to ask what for - he wasn't trained in medicine, what could he do? - but he knew that Owen asked for help we really needed it. Toshiko was dying, and so was Gwen. Both of them needed his help, and both of them needed it now.

In a fit of panic, he started to get to his feet...

* * *

**Uhh yeah... haven't updated in months. Been busy and such. But I'm back now and I will certainly be finishing this story!**

**Please tell me what you think and I'd also like to see a show of hands to who you think Jack will/should save...**


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